Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said his Monday stop in New Hampshire to campaign for Manchester mayoral candidate Joyce Craig was not about presidential politics, but was part of his effort to help the Democratic Party turn a new page and focus on leading with practical solutions.

“Americans don’t wake up wondering what the Republican Party’s agenda is or wondering what the Democratic Party’s agenda is. They wonder whether they can find leaders who can answer their problems, who will come up with solutions to the challenges that they face,” the 46-year-old mayor of the nation’s second-largest city said in an interview.

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“The next generation of leaders that comes up has to have that practical experience. Not just saying what we’re against, and not just saying what we’re for, but having the guts to do it.”

Garcetti’s visit to the Granite State, the home of the first-in-the-nation presidential primary, prompted the expected speculation that he is eyeing a run for president in 2020. And he did nothing to quell that speculation Monday.

“People are looking for that sort of practical experience,” he said. “But for me, I’m not running for president. I’m running the city of Los Angeles and I’m committed -- even if in two or three years (running for president) isn’t an option or something I decide not to do -- to stitch together a different sort of fabric."

“I think that mayors and state executives haven’t come together to counter the narrative of Washington, D.C.,” Garcetti said. “And I don’t just mean President (Donald) Trump’s narrative. I think that for a long time, this country was about our strength and our localities empowering Washington. And now, we’ve all become dependent on Washington.

“So when Washington fails, we all are feeling like we fail when, in reality, I go to L.A. and if I just turn off the national news, we’re doing great. I go to other parts of the country and see the innovation and the rebirth.”

In the aftermath of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss to Trump, Garcetti is among a group of young Democrats who are in the conversation for 2020 and beyond. Another, Ohio U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan, was in the Granite State two weeks ago.

Unlike Los Angeles, with its population of 4 million people, Manchester -- population 110,500 -- “is the kind of city where you can actually get to know every single voter, or your campaign can, and then you can come back to them repeatedly,” Garcetti said. He also told WMUR that he’ll return to the state in the future.

Craig, a former alderman, is making her second bid to unseat Mayor Ted Gatsas, who is seeking a fifth term in what is now the most closely-watched contest in the state. Gatsas defeated Craig in 2015 by 64 votes in a recount.

Although the Manchester municipal elections are officially nonpartisan, Craig is a Democrat and Gatsas is a Republican. The city’s primary election will be held Sept. 19, with Craig and Gatsas among four people on the ballot.

The top two finishers will advance to the general election on Nov. 7.

Garcetti was elected in 2013 and re-elected in March with more than 80 percent of the vote.

“People are so cynical right now that they don’t expect someone to show up at their door and listen,” Garcetti said. “People want to know, ‘What are you going to do on my block, in my neighborhood?’”

“Keep it local. Keep it focused where people live. That’s where politics happens.”

Garcetti said Craig’s campaign team reached out to him for support earlier in the summer when he vacationed with his family in Portsmouth.

He began the day meeting with volunteers for Craig’s campaign and appeared at an event for the New Hampshire Young Democrats in Manchester.

On Monday evening, Garcetti headlined a fundraiser for Craig in Derry, hosted by Town Councilor Joshua Bourdon and his wife, Leah.

While he was greeted warmly by Democrats, he received criticism from state Republican Party Chair Jeanie Forrester, who focused on his support for a $10 million public and private fund to hire lawyers to defend local undocumented immigrants facing deportation. The NHGOP also noted that Los Angeles’ crime rate was up for the third consecutive year in 2016 after reaching all-time lows in prior years.

“Campaigning with Mayor Garcetti shows just how out of touch Joyce Craig is with the needs of Manchester families,” Forrester said. “Mayor Garcetti uses taxpayer funds to shield illegal immigrants from the law. Los Angeles is living through a rise in violent crime and murder under his watch. No wonder Joyce Craig is holding her fundraiser with Mayor Garcetti in Derry instead of Manchester, where constituents would demand to know if Craig supports Garcetti's dangerous policies.”

Garcetti has been traveling outside of his home city and state in recent months. In June, he visited Wisconsin, a key swing state in a national general election, to address that state’s Democratic Party convention.

Last month, he traveled to Berlin, Germany, at the request of Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez, to speak with Democrats living overseas.

“I do hope that executives around this country consider running for president,” he said. “I think it’s important to show people who happen to be Democrats, but people who, run things like, for me, the biggest port in America, the biggest airport, the utility that’s the largest in the country – people want folks that are very practical-minded.

“I’m happy to support a fellow brother or sister mayor or look at a state executive,” he said, while also noting that Los Angeles “is bigger than states and Los Angeles County is bigger than all but five states.”

While Manchester struggles to deal with the continuing opioid crisis, Los Angeles has been facing the issue for many years.

Garcetti said his advice is to focus on early intervention in the schools. He said his city has also been using Medicaid expansion money to fund “sobering centers and nurse practitioner units that are located within paramedic vehicles, so you actually have professionals immediately intervening.”

He said it is necessary to have a “neighborhood-by-neighborhood grassroots network of nonprofits, whether it’s through churches, whether it’s through local organizations. They seem to have the greatest success in intervening and staying with people to get them on the road to recovery.

“That’s critical and it’s tough because government doesn’t like giving money to others. But it’s important because government doesn’t have the capacity to be in all places and have that knowledge on the ground on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis.

“You have to get to know these people by their names, by their history and then case-manage them. Usually, they get a touch for a few hours and then it’s back into the pool.”

Garcetti co-founded and chairs the Climate Mayors, a bipartisan group formed in 2014 to promote upholding the goals of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. He said it now has the participation of 369 cities, representing 75 million Americans in 44 states.

“There is a lot of power we have,” Garcetti said.

“I don’t live my life very far into the future, but I am committed to, when folks reach out to me, helping them, and then following that up.”

He said that he is on the advisory committee of a new 501-(c)(3) nonprofit, Accelerator for America, which, he said, “will try to amplify local solutions to national problems.

“Why should every place need to figure out the opioid crisis in a vacuum? Why should every place look at how to crack the nut of infrastructure on their own? Why should every place look at what the educational needs of making community college free are when we have all these great initiatives in other places?

“We’re looking at giving grants to local solution providers around the country, and it is a great way of looking at not what we’re going to oppose, but what we’re going to do.”

Garcetti said that looking ahead to the future of the Democratic Party, “I hope we have a better motivating factor than what we oppose and who we oppose. We need to have an agenda that is not focused on ourselves, but focused on this nation.

“If I analyze this last presidential race, I always tell my staff it’s the heart, head and gut check.”He said that people first want to know if a politician cares about their problems – whether they have a “heart.”

“Then people want to know if they’re smart enough to solve my problem.

“But the one that’s the most important is the gut. If you’re a normal person and you seem to connect with me and you have a couple of ideas about what to do, do you have the guts to see it through?

“Because I think with President Trump, I don’t think anyone would have said that his heart and his head were superior to Hillary Clinton’s. But they did feel like his guts were going to see it through. And so I think this next generation needs to know how to connect with folks and needs to know how to deliver.

“And that’s my mantra across this country – people who happen to be Democrats are delivering, not because they’re Democrats, but because we’re good leaders.”